Assistant Producer Anna Gier on attending a dress rehearsal at Opera Holland Park

As part of our partnership with Opera Holland Park, City of London Sinfonia players and staff get the chance to attend dress rehearsals. Assistant Producer Anna Gier tells us why attending a dress rehearsal is an especially enriching experience and talks about the operas she got to see.

My name is Anna Gier, I’m the Assistant Producer of projects and concerts at City of London Sinfonia, where I work across programming, commissions, participation projects, marketing, and orchestra management. One of the best things about being part of the CLS team is our wonderful relationship with Opera Holland Park, and I’m delighted to be able to attend their dress rehearsals.

Seeing a dress rehearsal at Opera Holland Park gives you advance insight into a cultural experience that concertgoers and critics across London will soon be sharing. Dress rehearsals offer essentially the same experience as performances—full staging, costuming and makeup, supertitles, and the musicians already on excellent form, of course—but with an insider’s glimpse into the complexity of coordinating a large-scale production which can otherwise appear hermetically sealed in its grandeur.

I went to see the dress rehearsal of this summer’s double bill featuring Il segreto di Susanna and Pagliacci, two Italian operas about suspected infidelity with very different endings; while Susanna’s secret leads to amusing misunderstandings, the suspicions of the husband in Pagliacci are proven correct and he seeks revenge. Pagliacci is typically performed alongside the opera that inspired it, Cavalleria rusticana, a pairing which offers no such contrast: Both end in death (hardly a spoiler—the only thing more common in opera than jealousy is murder!). Coupling Pagliacci with the more light-hearted Segreto is a compelling programming choice; the happy resolution of the first half’s drama prepares us to sympathise with the second half’s heroine, throwing into relief the excesses of the possessiveness we see so often in operatic repertoire.

OHP is an ideal venue for productions which make overt use of theatrical artifice in their storytelling, and this is especially apparent in how the staging depicted the blurred line between reality and performance in Pagliacci. The stage wraps around the orchestra pit and extends into the aisles, making the audience feel like part of the action. For the second act’s ‘play-within-a-play’, the onstage ‘audience’ faces the real audience, and the characters’ increasingly real conflict is positioned at the centre of a mise en abyme of spectatorship. While this self-reflexivity came across especially well in a rehearsal setting, which has an exciting element of letting viewers ‘behind the curtain’, early reviews confirm that it it is just as powerful in performance.

The atmosphere at an OHP dress rehearsal is electric; while the musicians and stagecraft practitioners get to enjoy an intensive period of collaboration over the course of a dense summer season, each dress rehearsal marks the beginning of a little adventure. There’s a real sense of camaraderie behind the good old rain-or-shine British mettle that characterises this opera company, and being invited in to see things take their final shape is a pleasure and a privilege.

Anna Gier, August 2024